Seismic tomography using travel-time surfaces for experiments in the laboratory

In this paper, seismic tomography using travel-time surfaces was performed for synthetic sediment samples in the laboratory. Travel-time surfaces were used for visualization of the data as well as for quality control. Tomographic experiments were first conducted on numerical test data and then on observed data recorded in the laboratory. For the observed data, the construction of travel-time surfaces allowed for better quality control of the data and identified where travel times needed to be re-picked. It was found that the resulting patterns on the travel-time surfaces were similar between the numerically simulated data and the measured data for similar structures giving added confidence in the travel-time picking procedures. The resulting travel-time tomography inversions were found to be able to reconstruct simple, as well as more complicated, structures in the synthetic sediment samples. But, careful picking of the observed travel times was required based on continuity of the travel-time surfaces to obtain good tomographic results. However, travel-time inversions still result in smoothed solutions and for finer scale features an additional waveform inversion may be required.